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Post by Roquefort Raider on Jul 1, 2020 15:34:09 GMT -5
X-Men #138... The mandatory "a major character is dead so we'll take a pause and reminisce about the past with plenty of vignettes" issue. I learned a lot about the X-Men's history in that issue, and seeing her tombstone convinced me that it was not an imaginary story: Jean was really dead. But why is the cover... SO... PINK? It may be required by comic book law for reminiscence issues? Or to quote the guy who gave Cosmic Boy his uniform... "It's pale scarlet!"
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Post by codystarbuck on Jul 2, 2020 11:29:49 GMT -5
Summer meant I was earning money; but, not much in the way of comics, yet. X-Men was one of my earliest issues that I bought myself (my cousin had some of the very early Cockrum issues) and the history of the X-Men was very well done by Claremont and Byrne. Micronauts had Pat Broderick livening up the art and we were getting into a great storyline, returning to form (though by pretty much rehashing the plot of the first year, which became a pattern). The annual was forgettable and I hated the Ditko art, then, and am not much of a fan of it now. I appreciate Ditko's style more, now; but, don't care for most of his output from this era.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Jul 2, 2020 12:44:55 GMT -5
I had about 15 titles this months. Others mentioned X-men #138 and Avengers #200, so a few other highlights for me included these offerings from Marvel (and, man, I still can't get over those f-in' banner ads!): Cap #250 came right in the middle of my favorite run, by Stern/Byrne/Rubinstein and that's a really good story - holds up after all of these years. So does the fun Dominic Fortune story in Marvel Premiere. On the DC side, these were stand-outs for me, for various reasons: DC Comics Presents had that New Teen Titans preview insert, which whetted my appetite for the new series (of course, the first issue didn't appear on the spinner racks of any stores that I frequented at the time, much to my eternal chagrin). JLA #183 was the beginning of a 3-part annual JSA team-up set in New Genesis/Apokolips. That was my introduction to the New Gods. After that, I purchased cheap back issues of a lot of the Fourth World stuff. By the way, once I started examining the newsstand feature at Mike's Amazing World, something that always fascinated me is the number of Richie Rich titles published by Harvey in any given month during the 1970s and early 1980s. In July 1980, there were 20 (!) separate Richie Rich books on the spinner racks. I'm still puzzled by the apparent popularity of this character.
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Post by Prince Hal on Jul 2, 2020 12:56:10 GMT -5
By the way, once I started examining the newsstand feature at Mike's Amazing World, something that always fascinated me is the number of Richie Rich titles published by Harvey in any given month during the 1970s and early 1980s. In July 1980, there were 20 (!) separate Richie Rich books on the spinner racks. I'm still puzzled by the apparent popularity of this character. Just ask the guy who was stocking the newsstand during those years. We had so many Harvey books that they required the same amount of shelf space as DC and Marvel together. But we didn't sell many of them at all. I wonder if any character in comics history was featured simultaneously in so many titles as Richie Rich.
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Post by brutalis on Jul 6, 2020 8:17:41 GMT -5
July 1980 and I have graduated from High School, begun my 1st regular paying job the last week of June as a "BAG BOY" (yes it was an actual job once upon a time, dedicated position using teens to ONLY bag up groceries in brown paper bags and escort and put into cars for shoppers, was even a yearly competition with engraved title/plaque for timing fastest and best/properly bagged winner, yes I won (out of 27 stores and 3 bagger's from each store competing) in July 1980 during my 3rd week working bagging) bagging up the customer groceries at the check out stand (in brown paper bags, NOT cruddy plastic) in Smitty's the local grocery store chain. So lots of money to spend however I wanted. My 1st paycheck for 2 weeks work actually bought and paid in full for a color television for my bedroom with money to spare. 2nd Paycheck in July bought my families 1st VHS recorder/player and 2 VHS: Gunfight at the OK Corral and the Magnificent Seven. Watched those bad boys every weekend with my dad for a long time. Still have the 2 tapes as sentimental reminders of that summer.
Was mostly purchasing comics from convenience stores with occasional stops to a local used store which would become one of the 1st LCS in Phoenix: All About Books and Comics. During July my uncle had given me the title to his Buick 4 door tank of a vehicle which had thrown a rod on his driving to and from his job at the Palo Verde Nuclear Plant and it was "trapped" at the plant where it died. It was mine on the condition I could get it towed into town and get a new engine installed. Luckily my best friend's father owned a local used car dump yard with tow trucks, tons of broken down cars for parts/etc. He towed the car to his junk yard for $25 bucks and a six pack of beer. Then over the summer he pulled parts and dropped a used engine into the car for $100 so that I would have a car for driving to work and school beginning mid August.
Not a lot to say over the comics of July other than it was a great summer, lots of anniversary issues and wonderful reads which many I still own and remember today.
Amazing Spider-Man 209 Avengers 200 Battlestar Galactica 20 Captain America 250 Cerebus 18 Conan 115 DC Comics Presents 26 Defenders 88 Dr. Strange 43 FF 223 FF Annual 15 Iron Man 139 JLA 183 LOSH 268 Machine Man 17 Marvel Premiere 56 MTU 98 MTIO 68 MOKF 93 Micronauts 22 Micronauts Annual 2 Powerman/IronFist 65 ROM 11 Spectacular Spider-Man 47 Spider-Woman 31 Star Trek 7 Star Wars 40 Thor 300 Warlord 38 What If 23 X-Men 138
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Post by dbutler69 on Jul 6, 2020 11:25:10 GMT -5
Micronauts had Pat Broderick livening up the art and we were getting into a great storyline, returning to form (though by pretty much rehashing the plot of the first year, which became a pattern). The annual was forgettable and I hated the Ditko art, then, and am not much of a fan of it now. I appreciate Ditko's style more, now; but, don't care for most of his output from this era. Yeah, I know what you mean. I dislike Ditko's 70's and 80's output, and it was always a disappointment to me to pick up a copy of Micronauts or Legion of Super-Heroes and find that he'd drawn it. Pat Broderick = big improvement.
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Post by codystarbuck on Aug 10, 2020 16:12:53 GMT -5
Ah, the summer; flushed with money and able to buy comics. Marvel Two-in-One had the Guardians of the Galaxy; so, it was a no-brainer. I had seen their appearances in Defenders and a cousin had a couple of the Marvel Presents issues and I loved the mix of superheroes and Star Trek. Plus, Yondu rocked the fin. Moon Knight was another no-brainer. Knew the character from Defenders and the issue was great stuff, detailing his origin. I missed out on the preview in DC Comics Presents; but, I didn't miss New Teen Titans #1 I couldn't wait for more, by the end. The Superman digest was filled with Silver Age stories of Superman in different identities and roles, including a story where he sees alternate life if he had landed on other planets. In each, he goes on to become a hero, with parallels to one of the JLA. X-Men brought Kitty Pride to the school and introduced Wolverines brown costume, while sending him back to Canada for some smokes and beer. I have no recollection of why I bought the Xanadu special, other than I liked the ELO music and wanted to know what the movie was about. Not much, judging by the story, inside. I missed the Captain Universe story in Micronauts, which is why I picked it up, wishing someone other than Ditko was drawing it. You could tell he didn't care about these things and was just picking up a paycheck. The stories were also rather dull.
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Post by Ozymandias on Aug 11, 2020 1:35:31 GMT -5
I don't remember how much money I had to spend on comics, but I do know there were very few comics on the stands that month. There was a couple more I didn't want, but this marked the end of an era. Over the following months, the original publisher who acquired the rights to sell Marvel comics (at the end of the 60's), started to close titles as they struggled to renew the contract.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 11, 2020 3:02:02 GMT -5
This was the summer we moved to Maine, and money was tight. I only got 2 comics this month, Star Wars 41 for the Empire adaptation, and Iron Man 140, which my aunt bought me, as it was one of two comic offering's at the register of Bud's Shop-n-Save, the other was an issue of the Unknown Soldier, whom I knew nothing about at that point.
-M
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Aug 11, 2020 3:35:46 GMT -5
August 1980... Man, was I ever that young? These books don't seem so old, but there we are, 40 years later! My stash of freshly-bought comic in that Summer from long ago includes... Amazing Spider-Man #210. Due to the lag between the original comic and its French translation published by Edition Héritage in Quebec, the artwork looked different from what I was used to: John Romita Jr. was the book's regular artist, while "my" Spider-man had mostly been Ross Andru's. That book was a lucky find at a nearby convenience store that sometimes carried American comics. Sometimes. Hey, there was a time when I had to hunt down comic-books! I even resisted the urge to subscribe to a few titles, because I enjoyed the hunt and the serendipity of the find! Good times. Conan #116. This is a reprint from an odd source: a mini-comic that came with a record narrating two adventures of the Cimmerian (produced by Power Records). I did not realize back then that Roy Thomas had left the mag. I knew this was a reprint, but just enjoyed the John Buscema / Neal Adams combo. I think Adams is a brilliant inker, and his work on Buscema's pencils is amazing (if all too rare). Man-Thing #7. You can't go home again, and a Claremont/Perlin moss-encrusted Man-Thing cannot hold a candle to a Gerber/Ploog carrot-nosed swamp dweller. And I'm pretty sure that that sentence has never been uttered before in the history of the English language. Micronauts #23. Still a lovely Michael Golden cover, still better-than-Chaykin Broderick art, but the book did not seem to be able to recapture its magic. Without Baron Karza, the Micronauts really lacked something. Savage Sword of Conan #57. I'm no prude but enough with the gratuitous boobs already. X-Men #139. First appearance of Wolverine's brown costume (still his best ever), first appearance of Heather Hudson, Nightcrawler learns Logan's name, Kitty Pryde is in uniform for the first time... Whew, new things *can* happen when you're not retreading the same old storylines again and again! Those were still the golden days of the title. X-Men annual #4. I'm embarrassed to admit that most of what I remember about Dante's Divine Comedy, I learned from this comic. I also thought that Minos looked a lot like the master of ceremonies in the movie Cabaret.
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Post by Ozymandias on Aug 11, 2020 9:52:13 GMT -5
Savage Sword of Conan #57. I'm no prude but enough with the gratuitous boobs already. As long as Big John was the one drawing them, I had no complaint. In fact, I originally bought Conan Saga when I switched to the original editions, but once I noticed it was censored, I had to hunt down the much more expensive Savage Sword.
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Post by berkley on Aug 11, 2020 15:57:35 GMT -5
Epic Illustrated #3 - Marvel's glossy colour mag never quite overcame a certain 'Heavy Metal Light' vibe but it was pretty consistently worth reading. With Craig ussell on Elric, Tim Conrad on Almuric, excerpts from new works by Starlin as well as by Moench & Gulacy, this isse was pretty stacked with good stuff.
Marvel Preview #23: Bizarre Adventures 2 - don't recall much abiut this issue; looking at the contents, the 2 Gene Colan stories were probably the main attraction for me but I was buying the mag pretty consistently in any case, unless it really looked bad.
Master of Kung Fu #94 - Moench, Zeck, and Day continued to make this one of Marvel's 2 or 3 best series at the time.
Thor #301 - an epilogue to the Celestials saga and pretty much the last hurrah for Thor, as far as my reading of the series was concerned.
X-Men #139 - solid superhero stuff. The Claremont/CockrumByrne X-Men was never one of Marvel's very best series in my eyes but always a reliably enjoyable read in its limiited way.
X-Men Annual #4 - I know I read an X-Men story that referenced Danté's Inferno so I assume this must have been it, but can't recall much about it except that it might have instigated me to read the John Ciardi translation as I seem to remember Claremont mentioning it in the letters page? At any rate, I had read the Dorothy Sayers version in a Penguin paperback a few years earlier but eventually read the Ciardi one, I think after hearing about it through the X-Men. As for the comic itself, I've generally found supernatural themes or characters to be a bad fit for superhero comics and while there are exceptions, this wasn't one of them, to my mind.
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Post by Ozymandias on Aug 12, 2020 5:04:13 GMT -5
Epic Illustrated #3 - Marvel's glossy colour mag never quite overcame a certain 'Heavy Metal Light' vibe but it was pretty consistently worth reading. With Craig ussell on Elric, Tim Conrad on Almuric, excerpts from new works by Starlin as well as by Moench & Gulacy, this isse was pretty stacked with good stuff. Marvel Preview #23: Bizarre Adventures 2 - don't recall much abiut this issue; looking at the contents, the 2 Gene Colan stories were probably the main attraction for me but I was buying the mag pretty consistently in any case, unless it really looked bad. That was the last issue in Spain, brought by a publisher that had nothing to do with the rest of the Marvel material (which was still in disarray around here). It came out in '82 and I bought it a few years later. It was part of the "adult" comic magazine boom, and suffered the fate of 95% of the publications that tried to take advantage of said boom. Sadly, this was better than even some of the few that survived. It goes to show that sometimes, the Marvel brand can be a drag.
Marvel Preview was never published as such, but some of the best stories, like the Miller 6-pager, were rescued for the Spanish edition of Bizarre Adventures.
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Post by codystarbuck on Sept 1, 2020 11:30:30 GMT -5
Micronauts was finally getting good, again, with the addition of Pat Broderick. That villain on the cover of New Teen Titans looks interesting; don't know about that guy in the shadows, though.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 1, 2020 11:38:48 GMT -5
Star Wars #42 is the only book I got off the stands this month. There were lots of great books released, and I have gotten many of them over the years as back issues, but we had no money for extras and my mom was still anti-comics for me at this point, but an exception was made for Star Wars. Ironically, I was probably more obsessed with Star Wars at this point in time than I ever was with comics when she decided they were taking up too much of my time and focus and decided I shouldn't have them any more (the difference being my older cousin who was having drug addiction issues at this time and who had been a big influence on my interests was into comics but not Star Wars, so Star Wars was safe and comics were taboo).
-M
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